Joe Biden Can't Shut Up...

Joe Biden Jr. passes the time by drawing houses. In a spiralbound notebook, he sketches a cottage for his widowed mom, a playhouse out by the pond for his grandkids, the vacation home he and his brother have always imagined for the extended family. Flower bos here, angle the roof just so, level an inch off the riser. Every detail matters, every pencil stroke is precise. He goes through draft after draft, reworking, rethinking everything. His home in Wilmington is a permanent construction site. "Hey," he'll say to his wife, Jill, "what if we took out these French doors, made a nice little study"

"Joe," she'll moan, "why do we need a study in our bedroom"

And yeah, sure, she's right, but the point—well, with Joe Biden, there are always several points. For one, the house sketching and home renovating is just a hobby, a quiet refuge for a man who's been in public life for over half of his sixtythree years. But it's also more than that. Biden wouldn't say this, but he doesn't need to He relishes the possibilities, the weights and measures, the beauty and logic and mutability of it all. It's who he is. (That time Bush squeezed his shoulders, grinning as he said, "Joe, I don't do nuance"—Jesus, how could a president brag about such a thing) And finally, for all his faith, for all the times his mom has assured him, "Joey, out of tragedy something good will come"—hell, Biden's whole life is testament to that—he's still haunted by chaos and disorder. He has seen perfect structures go suddenly to pieces. His family, his political career, his life. Indestructible one minute, and then…

So he drafts, and he redrafts. And he takes the train home to Wilmington every night.

Years ago, for about a week, Biden actually owned a house in Washington. He bought it just after turning 30 and after having coldcocked a popular Republican incumbent in Delaware's 1972 Senate race. But he never moved in. A month after the election, a tractor trailer plowed into a car containing his entire family, killing his wife Neilia and their 13monthold daughter, Naomi, and seriously injuring their two young sons, Beau and Hunter.

Biden makes mention of the tragedy now and again, but he refuses to dwell on it. He won't talk about what it felt like—what he went through, taking the oath of office, just three weeks after the accident, in his boys' hospital room in Wilmington, with Neilia's handbag at his feet…and almost every night thereafter, riding the train home to Delaware so his sons wouldn't worry about Daddy, or Daddy about his sons. He won't go into all that, because it's done with and it's private and like Mom says, something good has come—Jill has come. And then a daughter, Ashley. All three kids are now healthy and grown up. Still, the reason he rides all the way home, night after night, is to be with his wife and his mom, to be home. The daily photo finish to the train platform, the eightyseven minutes with his spiral notebook in his lap—it's an easy routine, and the only problem with it is that Joe Biden never thought of himself as a guy who settles into an easy routine.

He always thought of himself, frankly, as a man who ought to be president. Even before earning his bona fides in national security, Biden always relished big issues like busing, apartheid, domestic violence, genocide. No one ever accused Joe Biden of being too slight for the presidency. Still, the 2008 election is Biden's last shot, and he's struggling with the prospect of running. "It's not ambivalence," he says. "I haven't thought through how, tactically, I win this nomination. It's a Hillary thing—I look at the assets she brings to bear, and the conventional wisdom. Do I need $40 million, like they're saying How do I get there And if the mood of the party is so far left, then possibly that's death for me."

No, there's never been a question about want. The job has been on his mind since the late '70s, when people would mob the young senator after a JeffersonJacksondinner stemwinder and say Ya gotta run, Joe! In 1983, he agonized all the way until the New Hampshire primary filing deadline, then left the plane on the runway, thinking it better to wait for the next cycle. Four years later, in '87, he took the leap…and all of America got to watch Joe Biden become a national joke.

"It's hard to look back two decades and figure out what my motivation was," Biden says now. A hotheaded 44yearold orator, thinking grandly, with a clusterfuck of consultants every bit as ambitious as he was, Biden fulminated his way through Iowa and New Hampshire in 1987, quoting from all the great liberals of the day, that his vision might appear as worthy as theirs. Then came that August day at the Iowa State Fairgrounds when Biden simply became British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock—acting out, without any attribution, Kinnock's entire workingclass shtick "Why is it that my wife…is the first in her family ever to go to college Is it because they didn't work hard My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after twelve hours and play football for four hours" Campaign aides spun it as an homage, even though Jill Biden was not the first in her family to attend college and Joe Biden, unlike Kinnock, did not have coalmining ancestors. And when it later came to light that Biden had failed to cite Bobby Kennedy in a speech, that he'd also claimed (falsely) to have attended Syracuse University law school on a full academic scholarship and to have graduated in the top half of his class, and that he'd received an F in a lawschool class for an apparent act of plagiarism…well, "homage" didn't quite cover it. At best, Biden was a careless, immature overstriver. At worst, he was a liar. Either way, as Republican consultant Eddie Mahe told The New York Times that year, "What all of this means in a nutshell is that Joe Biden will never be elected president of this country."

But today, listen to Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Who's mimicking whom Joe Biden has emerged from tragedy and disgrace to become his party's statesman for the post9/11 era. He has been prescient on the war in Iraq for so long that he is accorded extraordinary deference by Republicans like Senator Chuck Hagel, who says, "I have great respect for Senator Biden's judgment. He's a man of immense character and integrity, as decent as anyone I've ever met in this business. I think he would make a very knowledgeable, experienced, and effective president."

The plan for achieving this is what preoccupies Biden. "I have to know it, feel it," he says. "Bush probably got handed that plan by Rove and said, 'Okay.' Me I want to sit and write the plan."

Joe Biden is no less conventional a white man than George W. Bush Roman Catholic, doesn't smoke or drink, roots for the Eagles, mingles easily with working stiffs, speaks no French, can't name a single song written after 1976. Unlike Bush, though, he thinks deeply and broadly and mostly aloud, and he gets there when he gets there. Long free of the plagiarist label and every bit his own man, he continues to talk like he sketches drafting and redrafting, starting and stopping and starting again, as lost in nuance as the man he hopes to replace is unbound by it.

One morning on the train to Washington, Biden is asked about international affairs. Does he see himself as a hawk in the vein of, say, the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson

"I served a fair amount of time with Scoop Jackson, and I didn't agree with Scoop Jackson," he says. "I would say I have more of a John Kennedy foreignpolicy outlook. Kennedy was a guy who thought we needed a really strong military. He thought we had an obligation to, where it was within our power, spread freedom in our own interests. He also placed an overwhelmingly high premium on cooperation with other nations. He believed that people, other nations and leaders, seldom acted against their own interests. They might be evil but not irrational. Whereas Scoop Jackson believed we could only change the world by force."

Here, Biden offers a shy sort of grin—he's well aware of his reputation—and asks permission to indulge himself. And suddenly, he's not talking about Kennedy anymore. He's talking about Joe Biden as a 19yearold lifeguard at an innercity swimming pool in Wilmington who's yelling at Ester "Cornpop" Williams, "Hey, Ester! Quit jumping up and down on the diving board!"

"He wouldn't get off," Biden says. "So I jumped in, took him out, and kicked him out of the pool. Well, so I'm closing the pool at dusk, and I always parked my Chevy convertible outside of this gate. The year before, there'd been a white lifeguard who'd gotten sixty, eighty stitches around the middle of his back because straight razors were the thing in those days. God, give me back straight razors instead of Glocks. Anyway. So Cornpop and some of his guys are waiting in my car for me with their straight razors. I say to the maintenance man, 'Look, let's call the park police.' He says, 'You do that, you might as well quit.' I said, 'Man, I'm not gonna go out there.' So he took me out to the boiler room, got a great big roll of chain, and cut off six feet and said, 'Wrap it around your arm, put a towel over it, and you go out and tell 'em you're gonna wrap that goddamn chain around their head.'

"So he's watching, everyone's watching, what am I gonna do I go out. Six foot one, 155 pounds, right I walk out, they creak their straight razors open. So I take off the towel and say, 'Cornpop, you may cut me, but I'm gonna wrap this chain around your head and hurt you.'

"Or that's what I was supposed to say," Biden says, leaning forward now, smiling. "That's Scoop Jackson. But here's what I said 'I was wrong in calling you out, Cornpop. You were wrong jumping on the board, and I should've thrown you out, but I shouldn't have called you Ester.' He looked at me. 'You apologize for calling me Ester Okay.' Puts up his razor, goes home. The point is, you gotta be prepared to use the chain—but there's other ways to do it. You know what I mean"

When Biden was a kid, he stuttered. His classmates dubbed him BiBi Biden. He compensated by learning to anticipate what the other guy was going to say, so as not to bungle his response. To listen to the senior senator from Delaware today is to hear an echo of, as one Biden aide says, "the kid who stutters, who didn't go to Ivy League schools, and maybe has to prove himself."

Biden eventually overcame the stuttering—got a law degree, won a race for county council at 27, then two years later became a United States senator—but he doesn't want to forget what he went through. Just like he doesn't want to forget the TV images of "Bull" Connor siccing police dogs on innocent blacks. Just like he doesn't want to forget how his father quit the auto dealership in Wilmington after the fatassed owner made everyone grovel for their Christmas bonuses by inging silver dollars onto the showroom oor. "That's an abuse of power," he says. "Just as it would be for a man to strike a woman, or a woman to strike a child, or a president to sic the IRS on you. There's this piece our parents absolutely inculcated in all of us Bidens—that no one has the right to use their physical or psychological or economic power to take advantage of someone else."

That righteous sensitivity, that aversion to unchecked authority, has often put Biden at odds with the swaggering Texan in the Oval Office. From their first meetings in the spring of 2001, Biden could see that the new president was shrewd and engaging, though he chafed at Bush's tendency to award pet names to those around him. ("There's a bullying aspect to that," Biden says. "If I give you a nickname, I've become your coach.") Nevertheless, Biden was determined to work with Bush and in the wake of September 11 emerged as one of his staunchest allies. He helped draft the resolution authorizing Bush to use force against our attackers. He made frequent trips to the Oval Office to discuss the invasion of Afghanistan. When Biden began to hear murmurs that the administration was eyeballing Iraq in early 2002, he convened Foreign Relations Committee hearings to solicit opinions from a variety of experts—a show of earnestness for which, he says, Bush personally thanked him. In September 2002, Biden promised Bush that if he worked to engage the U.N. and the American people on Iraq, "I'll be with you."

But Biden never meant to suggest that he would be some kind of yesman. Don Rumsfeld found this out when he invited the senator to breakfast at the Pentagon one summer morning in 2002. Biden figured Rummy wanted advice about Iraq. Instead, the secretary lit into Biden for talking to reporters about what at the time was not widely known—namely, the divide between pro and antiinvasion camps in the administration. "You brought me over here to chastise me" Biden snapped. "Who the hell do you think you are" That same summer, Biden took on Dick Cheney, accusing him and undersecretary of defense Doug Feith of undermining a chemicalweapons agreement with Russia. With Cheney and Feith sitting across from him in the Oval Office, Biden urged Bush, "Listen to your instincts on this one," and prevailed.

On another occasion, Bush summoned Biden to the Oval to discuss the pending global AIDS bill spiked with abstinence and faithbased provisions that rankled Democrats. In the presence of several subordinates, Bush grabbed Biden's lapel and said, "Joe I need your vote on this AIDS bill."

Biden knew a schoolyard challenge when he heard one. Grabbing Bush's lapel back, Biden replied, "Mr. President I'm a senator. We're equal under the law. That is a bad bill, and you're not getting my vote without some changes." In the end, Bush got Biden's vote and the $15 billion bill—but only after agreeing to a single amendment providing debt relief to AIDSstricken nations that happened to be authored by…Joe Biden. The two men still do business, but the edginess remains.

"I don't understand Bush," Biden says. "I really don't. I try very hard. I don't know how much empathy he has. I think it's harder for him to understand. I hate people doing this to me—I'm not qualified to say what makes him tick. But some of what makes him tick that I observe I don't find appealing. Like he told me he doesn't read the paper. I don't know. There's a piece of President Bush that's like some of the rich kids I went to school with, the du Pont types in Delaware I grew up around. During the Vietnam War, there were some very establishment kids from Delaware that I went to law school with who went the hippie route. Rebelled against the establishment. I never had a whole lot of respect for them, because they never gave up their inheritance, y'know what I mean I think there's an element of people who were raised that way, who are stied by it and want to be contrarian. Resist authority, whatever the milieu in which you're being raised, reject it.

"And there's sort of a piece of Bush in there. The cowboy stuff. Here's a guy, Skull and Bones, Yale, Harvard Business—went to some of the most prestigious schools in the world. And all you've got to do is look from the road in Kennebunkport at the estate, and you'll understand. It's not even that it's nice. There's nicer places. But it is a rock. It is a peninsula. It's old money. Power. Establishment. There's an understatement to it. But there's an awesome rooted power to it.

"Every time I think I understand the president, there's a lot more to him. Part of his persona is his alcoholism. I have alcoholics in my family. They're lucky to have an epiphany, and life begins at that epiphany. I think life began for George W. Bush at age 40. I don't think he was engaged till he got to be 40."

Joe Biden is, if nothing else, engaged. Like our pastor, we see him every Sunday, a genial, silverhaired sermonizer apping his jaws for Russert and Stephanopoulus. Though he retains the appalling good looks of a California quarterback, Biden has been gathering moss longer than all but five U.S. senators. He is so thoroughly insinuated into the daily ropeadope that we fail to notice how the young widower raised by giants like Fulbright and Mansfield and Stennis has, at the age of 63, become something of a giant himself.

As Republicans will never forget, in 1987 Joe Biden orchestrated the demise of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork by framing the debate as one about privacy rather than abortion. As the neocons would prefer to forget, it was Biden who led the charge to rid Bosnia of accused genocidalist Milosevic. ("I'm not gonna shake your hand—you're a goddamned war criminal," Biden said to the dictator when they met in 1993.) Feminist groups remember Biden for his authorship of the landmark Violence Against Women Act in 1994—though many still seethe over the then Judiciary Committee chairman's refusal to pummel Clarence Thomas back in 1991. And lest we overlook his accomplishments, Biden is there on television to remind us "I'm the guy who wrote the drugczar legislation." "I'm the guy that drafted the FISA act twentyfive years ago on the Judiciary Committee." "I'm the guy that wrote that crime bill, a hundred thousand cops…"

The truth is, much of his best work has been done quietly, off to the side—particularly on the Foreign Relations Committee, which stubborn old Jesse Helms would've driven into terminal gridlock but for Biden's steady cajoling. Mike Mansfield's tutorings in collegiality—Joe, our job is not to ascribe motives but to find that one thing in our colleagues that is most admired by their constituents—have served Biden well, and not just in legislation. When he made a mess of his 1988 presidential campaign, Republicans like Strom Thurmond and Alan Simpson were among the first to defend his integrity. When he returned to the Senate oor at the end of '88 after brain aneurysms nearly killed him, both sides of the aisle celebrated. And when Trent Lott received a gang ogging in late 2002 after praising Thurmond's Dixiecrat past, it was not a Republican, but rather Joe Biden, who thought to pick up the phone during a New Year's Eve party and tell Lott that out of tragedy, something good would come.

Newport, Kentucky, early evening at a Democratic fundraiser. Biden, tonight's featured speaker, bounds into the convention hall's pressroom. A TV reporter thrusts a microphone in his face, and Biden starts talking about the need for Democrats to appeal to former blue states like Kentucky. "We have put up too many candidates who can't connect with middleclass America," he says. "We've allowed socalled social issues to be divisive."

Then Biden puts a hand on the reporter's shoulder and with demonic pleasure lights into Tom DeLay. "The guy hasn't talked to members of his family in I don't know how many years," he says. "The next Republican that tells me I'm not religious, I'm gonna shove my rosary beads down their throat!"

This is the part of campaigning Joe Biden craves. He's got an audience who wants to hear what he thinks—no moderator, no sound bites—and by God, he will not be bridled tonight. He will stand before several hundred people and unleash the totality of his experience, his belief system, his vision—everything. The audience has not expected this. They'd forgotten, or perhaps never knew, the fiery orator of 1987. They laugh, they applaud wildly, they fall hushed as Biden, with preacherly deftness, unspools "the journey of America," the crises and the rising to challenges. After extolling the New Yorkers who stood in blooddonation lines after September 11 and Americans such as his wife and two sons who rushed to assist the Gulf Coast postKatrina, Biden stops on a dime. To a familiar face in the audience, 81yearold former Kentucky senator Wendell Ford, he says, "But during all this, one thing was missing that wasn't missing in your generation, Wendell—and it wasn't missing in my generation. They did it without leadership. They did it on their own. They had no clarion call. There was no great voice from the White House calling them to their heritage that is their country as John Kennedy called me and Franklin Roosevelt called my mother's generation. And folks, we use the word so easily in campaigns leadership. We use it so blithely that sometimes we forget. Leadership matters. It matters. It matters a great deal."

With that he rips into Bush—"What will cause George Bush to be judged so harshly are the opportunities he has squandered"—before turning on his fellow Democrats. "If we're really gonna be honest about it," he says, "some of the elites in our party are uncomfortable with faith. And they speak the loudest for us." Of the middle class, Biden says, "They're not on our radar screen. And they used to be our heart. They used to be who we were." All of which has made the Democrats an obliging piñata for the opposition "They've been so relentless. They've cowed us so much. And I'm sick of it."

The speech is pyrotechnic, unsparing, bigpicture, precise. It's also an hour long. "Let me conclude by suggesting one more thing in our little onesided conversation here," Biden finally says, to relieved chuckles. Then, several minutes later "I'll conclude this with what John Kennedy said." Then, a few minutes after that a Wendell Ford quote, followed by Biden quoting himself about how history will judge Bush harshly, followed, at last, by Biden saying, "I'll end where I began, by quoting an Irish poet," though before he can get there, he indulges himself in a nice little riff about his tenure in the Senate…

It's ten o'clock when he finally stands down. But Biden, who's already missed his ight to Chicago, is still pumped. He proposes an informal giveandtake in the pressroom with the gathering's Young Democrats, and thirty or so take him up on it.

In the pressroom, Biden loosens his tie, tosses his coat, and tells the youngsters to sit close. "I'd like to hear what's on your minds," he says.

"Um, we'd like to know what your message is," says a woman of college age.

"Well, I'll try to do that quickly, in the interests of time," says Biden, pacing the room. "If you want me to, I'll expand on it. I will." This is not hard to believe. "But I'm gonna deliberately truncate it. Lay out a whole platform for how I believe we should change the country. First and foremost…"

"What's a big problem for me—and I haven't mastered it yet, Norm's been trying to help me, and I think I'm getting better, but I have a long way to go—and that's how to take a complicated question and answer it succinctly and not appear to be giving a political answer which is pablum."

Biden's sitting in a nice Italian restaurant in Wilmington with his wife, Jill, and his communications director, Norm Kurz, talking about the challenges he might face in 2008. Biden ticks off his shortcomings, doesn't need anyone's prodding. He's not liberal enough for the base. He's rhetorically, uh, inefficient. He's too willing to work with the White House instead of just letting them selfimmolate. "That's what I get asked most often at these fundraisers 'Yeah, Senator, but why are you cooperating' I say, 'Look, I disagree with you guys on this. If in order for me to be president I have to win by further dividing the country, then I don't want to be president.' It has nothing to do with morality. Nothing to do with good government. It has to do with the simple proposition, and I mean this I can think of nothing worse than being locked in that gilded cage of the Oval Office, occasionally hearing 'Hail to the Chief,' and knowing everything you do requires a consensus and you don't have anything beyond a 51 percent solution. You can't do it! I give you my word. My word. I do not want to be president under those circumstances."

Continuing with the litany of shortcomings "Where I am on Iraq—in the red states, I'm okay… But some other places, people are upset about my being so out front on Iraq, not saying get the hell out, y'know."

"I told you I wouldn't support you." That's Jill, a lovely, dignified blond with two master's degrees and only the barest interest in politics. She'd been a student teacher in 1975 when Biden asked her out. Thirty years later, they still hold hands.

"That's right," chuckles Biden. "That note you put in my briefing book when I was going on a trip—tell him what it says."

Jill laughs. "It said, 'I sleep with a hawk.' "

When Biden heads off to the restroom, the conversation turns to the 2004 election—for which, after months of deliberation, he decided to sit on the sidelines. "The last time just didn't feel right," Jill says. "I kept saying to Joe, 'No, no, no!' And he wouldn't hear me."

"Oh, he heard you," says Norm Kurz, echoing the widely held belief that Jill had the final say. That he'd begun discussions too late, that by 2003 the wartime incumbent looked unbeatable, that their daughter, Ashley, deserved a college life free of scrutiny—all of these factors moved Biden's wife, current and former aides say. Still, it killed them to see their guy plumping for a windsurfer and writing foreignpolicy speeches that Kerry invariably muffed. Biden's able performance as surrogate on the Sunday shows made even Kerry's inner circle wistful, according to one of the nominee's senior aides "I know I pissed John off a lot, saying, 'Did you hear Joe on TV Get that tape. Say what he's saying.' He was better calibrated than John."

When asked why she feels better about 2008, Jill Biden says, "Well, look what Bush has done, for God's sake. Look what he's doing to the country. I know what Joe's capable of. I feel like he's someone who unites. The whole Cindy Sheehan thing—she's outside the ranch, had lost her son, and day after day was out there. If Joe was president, I could picture him walking down that dusty road and putting his arm around her and making her feel better about losing her son."

But what about how he gets there

"The process is really mean, so much meaner than anyone can begin to imagine. Does Joe have the stomach for that I don't know."

Norm goes on "A campaign where you and McCain actually travel together and actually have spontaneous debates that no one has to arrange."

Biden's eyes light up. "John McCain came up to me I don't know how long ago, couple months ago," he says. "Walked over on the oor, and he said, 'Let's make a deal if we end up being the nominees.' He grabs my hand 'Let's shake hands. Let's commit to do what Goldwater and Kennedy committed to do before Kennedy was shot. They agreed that they would campaign together, same plane, get off in the same city, and go to thirty states or whatever together.' I said, 'John, I commit.'"

It's a lovely notion, isn't it

What's likelier to happen is that the bloggers and the talkradio loudmouths will try to bury a Biden candidacy in 1987's muck. Because even today, after two decades of being Joe Biden, Statesman, there's still no answer to what begat Joe Biden, Plagiarist. Like all the other inane political misdemeanors—reefer inhalers, illegal nanny hirers, adulterers—Biden's sin goes, as they say, to character. To ethics. Of course, all candidates tell whoppers. But won't Joe Biden have to be Caesar's wife, above suspicion, to win

"I don't know whether I can meet the bar," he says. "Maybe this is proof I'm still naive, but I find it hard to believe that the average American, whether or not they like my positions, can look at me in a campaign and think I'm a dishonest man. Will we make a mistake Yes. I'm confident. That's why my sister got this idea Whenever I say something that's totally original, I'll say, 'As my father would say,' or 'As my grandfather would say,' or somebody—when I know it's me!"

Of course, all this overattributing and overqualifying just means, well, more words. It's like an enforced stutter—and it's doomed to fail. Inevitably, the opposition will jump on Biden for saying in recent speeches that he's never before mentioned publicly his Roman Catholic faith, when in fact he has; or for saying about Iraq in 2004, "I never believed they had weapons of mass destruction," when twice the previous year on the Senate oor he said the opposite; or for saying in the Newport, Kentucky, speech that his family lent aid in Katrinastricken Louisiana before FEMA officials and Bush arrived, when in fact the Bidens showed up five days after the president did. Without such harmless boasts, we'd have trouble telling politicians from ordinary folk. Besides, reining in Biden is perhaps the biggest risk of all, as a senior aide points out "He wants to be who he is, not some manufactured product. You don't want to go overboard and change him into a phony."

Biden agrees. "I believe the only really distinguishing feature I bring to this dance," he says, "is my reputation for being standup, straight, say it what it is. The moment I divert from that, I'm done. I'm done. So I don't think I can win by being more liberal. I'm not gonna win by having a better health care plan or a better Iraq plan. I win, if I win, because people look at me and say, 'Goddammit, there's a guy who's got strength, who knows what he believes and isn't gonna back down.'

"I happen to think I'll only get into trouble if I start to parse things, if I start to game it," he says. "It won't work for me."

In the cockpit of the C130 bound for Baghdad, Biden sits behind the pilots in a black turtleneck, circling passages in the book American Catholic. It's dark over the Iraq desert. He lets his felttip pen sag, closes his eyes. On the ight from Washington to Amman, the other three senators on board—Lindsey Graham, Maria Cantwell, and Say Chambliss—all managed to sleep, but the Ambien did Biden no good. He read his briefing book, chatted with the pilots, and mused aloud about 2008 and Iraq the entire way.

This is Joe Biden's sixth trip to Iraq. The first time, three months before the war began, he and Chuck Hagel were smuggled across the Turkish border to take the pulse of Saddam Hussein's greatest victims, the Kurds. Biden was already convinced that the dictator should be ousted. He had called Saddam "a certifiable maniac" in a speech the day before September 11. A month later, he called for a White Houseled coalition to "tighten the noose around Saddam Hussein's neck so that when he does genuinely step out of line next time, we will have the ability to move in with or without others, but with the support of the rest of the world, like we're doing in Afghanistan." But while feasting on kebabs and pomegranates with Kurdish leaders, Biden learned "that left to their own devices, they were doing pretty damn well. And they were worried that things might spin apart [after an invasion] and wanted to know, Are you guys gonna stay, or are you gonna do what the other Bush did to us"

Tonight, after landing in Baghdad and being whisked by helicopter to Saddam's old presidential compound to meet with a group of American officials overseeing Iraq's reconstruction, he's in no mood to be pollyanic. He's stonefaced—"the bastard at the family picnic," as he puts it—while they report on Iraq's progress 4 percent economic growth, stable currency, 30,000 registered businesses…

"The ministries here can't function without the U.S., can they" Biden cuts in. "I mean, at least the president is leveling with us now—not the crap we heard before. But really, absent bringing over another 300 people from State to embed in the ministries, I don't see what the plan is."

"The plan," replies one of the officials carefully, "is to help them develop their own structures."

"They had a sophisticated bureaucracy! And we blew it away when we did this deBaathification. Am I wrong about this"

"That's a serious issue," the official says.

The following morning, December 15, the polls open in Iraq. Two Black Hawk helicopters airlift the delegation over the streets of Baghdad and south across irrigated fields and stretches of parched badlands. At noon, Biden strides into the polling station in Hillah wearing his suit and ak jacket. While the other three senators dip their fingers in purple ink and chat up the poll workers in the presence of TV cameras—"Congratulations! Today's a great day to be an Iraqi!"—Biden surveys the scene restlessly. He'd predicted that security forces would clamp down on the violence; he'd forecast a high turnout. But in the briefings the delegation has had with Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Generals Casey and Dempsey, and Iraq's electionsecurity chief, it's clear to Biden that today is the easy part—that, as he keeps repeating at every stop, "an election does not a participatory democracy make."

Outside the polling station at a press conference, each senator takes turns applauding the brave and democracyhungry Iraqis. But Biden delivers a parting shot. "The Iraqi people should take a look at our forces," he says. "They're black and they're white and they're women and they're men. They represent all of America. We are a society that has learned to live together. And quite frankly, that is the challenge ahead of all of you. Sunni, Shia, Kurds—you've got to learn to live together. You do that—that's a success."

Muttering under his breath as he departs the gaggle, he says, "We are celebrating too much."

On the ight back to the States that evening, Biden's Ambien kicks in. He sleeps a good four hours before the aircraft lands at Andrews just before seven in the morning. He goes to the Senate gym, showers, shaves, and puts on a fresh suit. Then he heads over to the White House to debrief the president.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Steve Hadley, Andy Card, and several senators are seated at a conference table in the Roosevelt Room. Bush begins the meeting with an enthusiastic statement about the election. On the videoconferencing screens, Khalilzad and Casey add their thoughts. Rumsfeld makes a few surprisingly candid remarks about the security forces, leading Biden to wonder if the defense secretary has essentially dumped the whole thing in Condi's lap Okay, now it's your war! Then Rice does her effusive thing, followed by McCain—who to Biden's dismay, limits his remarks to pap like "We're gonna beat the terrorists"—and then Joe Lieberman, who might as well be waving pompoms. Lindsey Graham is next—tough little guy, Biden thinks as the South Carolina senator rattles off a few worrisome matters.

At last Bush says to Biden, "Go ahead." He's got to keep it short and sweet. "Mr. President," he says, "if we defeat every member of Al Qaeda, you've still got a war on your hands. The Baathists, the Saddamists—they're killing our guys, too. If I can put it in American terms, they had an election. But now comes the primary, and it's gonna be won in the next six to eight weeks. With all due respect, you really ought to jump in with both feet."

"Okay, basically you've been right about the cops," Bush says.

"I know you don't like foreignpolicysounding things like 'contact groups,' " Biden says. "But there's got to be cumulative pressure from the international community on the regional powers to put pressure on their surrogates."

Nodding, Bush says, "Condi, tell the senator what we're doing."

Rice brings him up to speed on recent conversations with the Germans and the French.

"You've got a shot with the Germans now, Mr. President—you've got a conservative chancellor," Biden says. He makes a few other points, mixing in some praise "You're making some real good changes on the ground." Finished, Biden looks at his watch. Four and a half minutes. Personal best.

"We should do more of this," Bush says, as the meeting breaks up. On their way out the door, Biden says, "I really think you should bring in people who completely disagree with you, Mr. President. Guys like Jack Murtha, who think it's the bottom of the ninth and we can't win this. I know you don't like hearing from those kinds of guys…"

A week later, Joe Biden sits in his Capitol hideaway office on an early Wednesday evening, watching CSPAN. The office is a temple of masculinity, all leather and gold and burgundy, with an 1876 fresco depicting the signing of the Louisiana Purchase overhead. Logs crackle in the fireplace. Biden's jacket hangs behind him on his chair. His indeinger nail is still purple, looking at this point more like a homeimprovement mishap than a totem to democracy.

He's discussing an incident that took place during his brief tenure on the University of Delaware football team forty years ago. The story had come up at dinner in Wilmington with his wife—one of those epic Biden digressions that seemed both acute and elusive. Everything in the present reminds Joe Biden of something in the past. Dad saying don't ever make fun of the unfortunate, Senator Mansfield's admonition never to question someone's motives, the priest giving him last rites before brain surgery in 1988, Bush talking about nuance, Hillary's war chest—it's all related, a divine architecture. And so it seems that to talk to Biden about the odds facing him in 2008 is to conjure up that time on a football field when, to his shame, he cared too much about the odds

"It was my junior year," he says, "and I was trying out for defensive back. I'm free safety, twelve or fourteen yards over the line. A hole opens up over the tackle, and this 210pound fullback comes blowing through like a freight train. I see the play open up, and I blow into the same hole. I can see the linebacker out of the corner of my eye—he hits the fullback a split second before I get there. But instead of running right through the son of a bitch, I just kind of hit him a little. I knew what my job was Forget there's a linebacker; run through the son of a bitch! But I calculated, ahhh, he ain't going anywhere.

"And I felt guilty," he says, pacing now in front of the fire, "because I didn't do my job. I thought less of myself. I didn't live up to my expectations of what I was supposed to be. I'm supposed to be the guy who gets up and does it."

Did the coach call you on this

"No! This was all me."

But why, after all these years—wait. You embrace this story. You want to hold it over your own head.

"Like, 'Joe Goddammit. Stand UP. Stand up.' I gotta take a leak…"

A minute later, Biden returns. "So, back up," he says as he falls into his chair. "Here's the ambivalence part. Not can I win But—they say to run for president, you've gotta be a little bit dissatisfied with your life. And I'm not. So maybe someone else is gonna step to this and do it the way it should be done. And that's fine! But that's when the football analogy comes up Why aren't you doing this I can hit that fullback! I know I should! What the hell am I waiting for

"It is worth it," he says, "if I can bring the country together."

He looks up at the television. The Republicans have failed to get the votes to cut off debate on an appropriations bill. By the time they finish, it'll be too late to make the train to Wilmington. No matter. There's a birthday party for his granddaughter in Washington tonight. Maybe he'll stop by.

And the next week, they'll come from the District and Boston and Philly and Chicago—his family and his brain trust, sitting together in the permanent construction site of his home in Wilmington, and figure it out how Biden will hit the damn fullback.

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